A Letter to My Cereal

Dear Honey Bunches of Oats with Cinnamon Bunches:

I love you. You are delicious. But if we are going to have a beautiful relationship together, we need to start with honesty. You are overkill. When I tell people about how delicious you are, I’m going to sound like an idiot because that’s what your name does to me. “Honey Bunches of Oats with Cinnamon BUNCHES.” Really? Did the marketing team of Post cereal, Honey Bunches of Oats division, even have a meeting when you were developed? Or was someone just like, “Hey, we have this new cereal with cinnamon bunches; what should we call it?” And the rest of the team was like, “Just say ‘with Cinnamon Bunches.” Didn’t ONE person stand up in that meeting and go, “But we already have ‘Bunches’ in the name…isn’t that a little redundant?” I have to think that someone at least thought it. Is your company full of spineless zombie lemmings? No one in your entire corporation knows any synonyms for “bunches?” I think that should be a job requirement. “Clusters” is an excellent alternative. It’s perfect; the cinnamon parts are totally cluster-like. Or you could really change it up and go for something entirely different. I mean, I don’t have a marketing degree or even much of a marketing mindset, but you totally could have set yourself apart as this new, completely awesome cereal in the cereal aisle if you had gone with an advertising approach where you crossed out Honey and wrote in “Cinnamon!” (With or without the exclamation mark, it’s up to you. I’m not the marketing guru here. Then again, neither is your team of geniuses, apparently.) Then instead of your consumer walking down the cereal aisle and saying, “Oh my word, seriously? Has Honey Bunches of Oats come out with ANOTHER variety? When is this going to stop?!” they will be saying, “Wait, is this the same thing as the other ones? Is the honey flavor gone entirely? Have they taken out the honey bunches? Did Honey Bunches have to take a mandatory retirement? Was there some sort of big falling-out between Honey and Oats? Did Honey have a scandalous affair with one of the staffers? Are they trying to confuse me by covering it up? Was there an epic battle between Honey and Cinnamon and Cinnamon won and now it’s trying to take over the world one cereal at a time? …I’ll buy some.” See, confusion creates interest, and interest sells cereal. Plus, you don’t put the new part at the end of the title. No one will get that far because people are lazy about reading. Plus PLUS, everyone knows that cinnamon is better than honey. Just saying.

On a final note, we are having another fight now, because I have said the word “bunches” so many times in my head that it doesn’t sound real anymore. Bunches could not possibly be a real word. So thanks for that.

I’m still eating you again tomorrow morning, though.

All my love,

Ashlee